The Time of Year You Can See the Air Move
Most of the time, you can not see the air move. You can feel it, but the complex, turbulent motions are invisible to you, except when it interacts with leaves and branches on trees and plants. But for a few weeks of the year, the sky is full of small, cotton-like tuffs that like a natural MRI machine reveals the complex three-dimensional motions of the atmosphere. Cottonwood season. And we right in the middle of it. Being cottonwood aware is of particular value this year. It reveals the active dispersion and movement of air that makes the outdoors essentially COVID safe, and thus should be of some comfort for those nervous about transmission outside. Cottonwood seeds are embedded in small cotton-like fibers. A million seeds weigh about 3 pounds. Yes, each seed and tuff weights about .000003 pounds. And that fact, plus the cottonwood tuff, means that these seeds fall VERY, VERY, VERY slowly. So slowly that they are excellent markers for the three-dimensional flow of the
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